The E8300 comes part-way through Intel's range E8xxx series of dual-core processors which is headed by the 3.33 GHz E8600.

At 2.83 GHz, the E8300 is technically 18% less powerful than the top-of-the-range model, but our tests showed it to be only 11% less powerful than its big brother.

This discrepancy becomes clear when compressing files, for instance, where the E8300 takes 3 minutes 26 seconds to perform the same task that the E8600 can do in 3 minutes 6 seconds.

Nevertheles, if you're a habiutal user of powerful software, the results of our tests with Photoshop CS3 suggest you should possibly look at a quad-core processor instead of something from the dual-core E7xxx or E8xxx series.

The Q8200, for instance, a Core 2 Duo Quad model running at 2.33 Ghz only took 3 minutes 33 seconds to apply a complex filter to our test photo, even though the E8300, with a clock speed of 2.83 GHz, needs 4 minutes 48 seconds to finish the job.

The E8300 is fairly reasonable in its power consumption given how much performance it delivers, but it's a long way from being an energy efficient processor.

Up against Intel's great rival AMD, the Phenom X4 9650, a quad-core processor, comes close to the E8300 on certain tests, but their respective performances are too close to give a definitive answer about which one is better.